Online information is growingly influencing consumers’ purchase decision, and consequently firms may attempt to manipulate online information to amplify their sales. Different from prior work focusing on the impact of online information manipulation on a firm’s performance, few addressed the issue of its rival’s fight back to such information frauds. This paper investigates a duopoly market where one competitor considers how and whether to adopt fight-back strategy in response to its counterpart’s online information manipulation. Results show a firm’s manipulation strategy necessarily detriments to its rival’s payoff in two distinct ways (i.e., convert manipulation and overt manipulation), while the rival’s fight-back could impede the firm’s adopting manipulation, and its own profit improves accordingly, thus generating the effect of ‘two birds with one stone’. In addition, we also find that regardless of whether the rival adopts fight-back strategy or not, the firm still has the likelihood of online information manipulation intention, but the rival’s reactive behavior yields three possible outcomes (i.e., stoppable manipulation, unstoppable manipulation, and never-happened manipulation) under different conditions.

在线信息越来越影响消费者的购买决定，因此，公司可能会尝试操纵在线信息以扩大其销售量。与先前的工作侧重于在线信息操纵对公司绩效的影响不同，很少有人讨论其竞争对手对此类信息欺诈的反击问题。本文研究了一个双头垄断市场，在该市场中，一个竞争者考虑了如何以及是否应采用反击策略来应对对方的在线信息操纵。结果表明，公司的操纵策略必然以两种截然不同的方式（即转换操纵和公开操纵）损害其竞争对手的收益，而竞争对手的反击可能会阻碍该公司的操纵，其自身利润也会相应提高，这样就产生了“两只鸟一石雕”的效果。此外，我们还发现，无论竞争对手是否采用反击策略，公司仍然具有在线信息操纵意图的可能性，但是竞争对手的反应行为会产生三种可能的结果（即可阻止的操纵，不可阻止的操纵，和从未发生过的操作）。